


Feathered Sanguine

by Nanosilver



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Founding of Konoha, Friendship, Gen, Mental Instability, Psychological Drama, Self-Insert, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-08
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-05 15:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5380604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanosilver/pseuds/Nanosilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crimson are the eyes that haunt our dreams, sleeping and awake. I never expected to find myself in the midst of a clan whose entire purpose of existence seems to be to squabble over power endlessly, but that likely isn't even the worst problem I am facing. I have a script, but the plot has long since changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pandemonium

**Author's Note:**

> The drawing was made by my wonderful friend [Nicky](http://kisamesfacioplegia.tumblr.com/post/118020299176/a-drawing-i-made-for-a-friend-of-her-oc-for-a)

 

**1\. pandemonium**

* * *

_Welcome to the storm_  
We're babies till we're born  
Then adults from our first day breathing

―  _Black English_ _, „The Long Haul"_

We all dreamed of better things sometimes.

Some of us more than others. Some were content with life, others lamented its every aspect. I certainly wasn't the former, and I couldn't exactly say I  _wasn't_ the latter, but I still found enjoyment in so many things, in art and music – and warmth, wherever I found it.

Regardless… I dreamed of better days, and at the age of sixteen I already regretted too many things. No one should have to start their adult life with scars of regret on their hearts. Some things-  _many_  things had gone wrong in the past, some but not nearly all of them in my control, yet I longed for a way to fix them.

Death certainly wasn't what I had expected  _or_  wished for, but in the end I guess it worked out. Somewhat.

I had always been fearful of dying. Looking back, I think it wasn't so bad. I got hit by a train on accident, and darkness came. It didn't even hurt, I suppose I was gone too quickly for anything to register.

It's what happened  _afterwards_  that seemed quite strange, unbelievable perhaps, to the closed mind – and thus, to me, as I did not believe in reincarnation or any kind of afterlife, being mostly atheistic in nature. I had doubts about the nature of the world sometimes, mind you – but I more often than not felt caged by religious spirit, and in the end remained faithless.

What happened to me could have happened to anyone out there, I believe. I wasn't in any way special, I just happened to be at the right place at the wrong time. Or the right time? I don't know if the universe played a cruel joke on me, hearing my pleas for a different childhood- whether it heard my wishes for a new life and decided to mock them – but the darkness that had claimed me for so long faded, leaving me to a world without light but filled to the brim with life.

Well, this certainly wasn't what I had imagined death to be like.

For a very long time… I just existed. There is no other way to describe it. Feeling slowly returned into what appeared to be a body now, and hearing developed, letting me notice voices as time passed. I became aware of limbs, heart and something else I wouldn't be able to understand for a long time, and was sent into a period of doubt, of asking – what was happening to me? I should be dead, right?

Had they put me into the hospital and my brain was actually paste from the collision? But why would I not understand the voices then? Had I lost my ability to communicate via language?  
None of that really made sense, but I kept wondering regardless, deprived of anything else to do, and sometimes… no,  _often_  I was afraid.

After a while the veil of darkness lifted – the world moved and became alive, and the once dulled voices rang sharp and clear. Blots of colors danced in front of my eyes, shadows moved and vague shapes formed and scattered in a moment's notice, a vision that thrived.

I wasn't dead.

In confusion I screamed, and there was a voice, loud and shrill and high-pitched unlike my own, desperate and aimless-

An infant's wail, a young baby fresh from birth. I fell silent then, contemplating this strange fact, and the world stopped spinning, stopped being alive. The pandemonium quelled, voices quieted, I felt like all of existence fell in line with my silence.

I wasn't dead, nor was I alive. I was - by all definitions - reborn, and the old self of me was gone while this new one thrived in its place, filled with old memories and thoughts but gifted – or cursed – with a world and body foreign to it in its entirety, at least for a while.

Settling into this… this new state of existence, one could say… it took time. I was someone else's child now, and the thought of having to abandon my old life so thoroughly was a fact I did not deal with easily. A new beginning seemed great until one remembered that one had to flush out all the pleasant things as well. There were friends I missed greatly, although the memory of them was a blur, the feeling remained – a few I had loved especially, and my heart now yearned.  
My family I strangely did not miss. Perhaps it was the thought of a kinder life that spurred me, but the most broken part of my childhood I was ready to leave behind.

From the day of my birth I remember little. My mind was sixteen, but my body was not. It didn't hold on to the memories very well, no matter how much I tried to force it, and images slipped away and became blurry. I came to believe that memories were matter of body and soul, and that they had to be equal to both to be accessible in their fullest. Thus it came that my old life was about as blurry to me as the world around me, moments flashing up here in there but never willing, never desired. I had kept my skills, for the most – with effort I could remember my old languages (and I practiced those in my head, just to remember them – I spoke German and English, and some Spanish as well, although the last one faded too quickly for me to hold on to it), and other things that I had once learned, ingrained as they once were, but many things were beyond me. I was for all intents and purposes forced to start anew.

Around me was a sea of energy, of life, of terror. I felt like drowning, suffocating under this weight that pressed on my body, fell on my shoulders like a heavy blanket and filled my lungs, my flesh, every fiber of my body in its entirety. It was so strange, so entirely  _foreign_  – imagine you could feel the oxygen in your body. With time it became distant like a faint tingle, always there, ever swirling, ever  _itching_. It was unnerving, irritating, maddening.

I grew used to it only slowly, and I bet the world around me thanked me kindly for it when it finally happened, for I suddenly became a much more quiet infant. Regardless, I didn't realize what was drowning my senses until much later.

For a long time – (a week actually, but I didn't know that) I thought I had no father. There was a woman who cared for me tenderly, who sang me lullabies and spoke to me with a soft voice as smooth as a gentle river current, but there was no man to accompany her. I had heard voices, male and female, during my time in the darkness, but none of them were here now, none spoke to me the way I heard them murmur before.

There were servants, I believe. Women mostly, with a soft demeanor and low voices, obedient and often strangely passive. I couldn't understand their words nor see them properly, but they seemed to be… below us in standing, for lack of a better word. My family had to be of noble birth or at least considerable wealth to maintain a servant branch.

Thus I spent my days, wondering, questioning, observing as much as I could – trying to understand this strange world, this strange circumstance, this foreign path fate had led me to. I was a baby. Okay. I came to terms with that. Free service?

My old home, friends and so on and so forth were gone. Okay, I would come to terms with that surely… one day. Probably. Maybe.

I had no father? Okay,  _that_ … that wasn't so great. I could come to terms with leaving my old life and all its problems behind, but if I had to start a new life in the first place I'd really like the full package. I wanted a father. The last one had done a subpar job, honestly.

And… I feared. Feared that maybe he was dead, or that he didn't even know I existed. Maybe he didn't care. Those thoughts, the implications, the consequences - they scared me. Here was this woman, warm and caring and nurturing and all the things a mother should be - a circumstance I was entirely new to - and to her I might actually be more the remnant of a tragedy than anything else.

I wasn't  _used_  to parental care, of any kind. In my past life neglect had been part of my normal day routine. I had to take care of myself, and because I couldn't – small children simply  _can't_ \- a lot of things in my life had gone very wrong. Having the beginning of this life marred by mourning was not a thought I wished to entertain any longer, and so I took my mind off of it. It was easier to focus on the presences that surrounded me than to linger on poisonous thoughts, and so I took them all in. My mother's was flowing, moving smoothly, like a river or an ocean, calm but agitated occasionally much like the water of the seas, and carried a tender hint of sea breeze under its patient waves.

That week two new presences appeared, and they drowned out everything else. For a few moments I once again thought I was suffocating as they neared, swelling to a size and weight that was  _unfathomable –_  until they seemed to cover the entire world. They were different in their natures, one calm and soft and spreading forward like the roots and leaves of a tree, carrying a distinct feel of mother earth, yet heavier than the other one – that one was seemingly angry, swirling aggressively in a malevolent vortex of heat and ash. My throat ran dry when I focused on it, and yet it felt familiar, very much like the energy that surrounded me, and swirled perhaps even within myself.

I couldn't quite tell.

After a while they faded into softer versions of themselves, lying dormant below a barely sealed surface, flaring here and then in short and uneven intervals. It was nigh torture to feel them spike and jump in jagged lines, like a heartbeat. They bled into the rest eventually, mixing into a sea of energy, but always distinct in their own ways, recognizable among smaller lights of similar nature easily.

It was the same day that something happened, something I remembered clearly and vividly even years later. Evening seemed to have come, for darkness had enveloped the world. I saw no more colorful dots of light through my limited vision and tiredness claimed me, though it often did so, even when it was bright as day.

What I remembered so well, it was… it was the scent of smoke and cinder, the feeling of a moving shadow and the knowledge that I was alone, and no one there to stop it. It crept through the house, its presence so unnoticeable that it literally became a shadow to me, like trying to hear a sound at the edge of your hearing. Barely there, and its attempt at not existing almost drove me mad.

It made its way, choosing the path of least resistance – past the few still wandering servants I could feel clearly, and it must've been well hidden for it seemingly passed them without their notice.

So it moved, and moved, and moved closer and closer to  _me._

Anxiety became fear.

This hidden presence had no business being here, and it was coming for me. And elsewhere… elsewhere I thought a fire raged, flaring like an inferno through halls and rooms and into the streets, distracting all those who could have noticed the plight of a tiny infant. Did I matter? Would they come? Would they prioritize saving this little thing over ending the destructive desires of a fire? I fell silent, fearing that any noise at all could end my life, and shivered in terror.

The image of a monster in the night became very very real.

The door slid open, agonizingly slow. I saw nothing, only heard the by now familiar noise, but it was enough.

I feared this death, for I saw it coming this time. Would I be reborn again? It was a question that tormented me, and would many times in the future, but today it was augmented by the helplessness that kept me chained to a crib.

I was just a baby.

Just a tiny, helpless, squishy  _thing_ , anything could kill me at any moment, could end my life within just a second-

The shadow crept, without a noise, without a single sound; no breathing, no steps, no rustling clothes – was it human ?Was it a ghost?

I stopped breathing, my weak body paralyzed, thoughts flashing, dashing, racing through my mind-

Death, fear, it'll kill me, it'll end me, why here, why now?

I felt it lurking above me now, suffocating me with its existence, its presence creeping into every remaining crevice of my mind, filling it like a drifting mist. Amongst all of this a biting stench reached my nose, almost invasive to my senses. Oil?

Was it going to  _set me on fire_?!

I panicked even more, and perhaps I would have struggled, had I been able to. My body remained still, forcing my mind to deal with itself.

It lingered above me, still not breathing, still not being human, and all I truly sensed was this abominable  _stench_ -

There was heat, and there was a lack of oxygen, and there and then I truly believed it had set me on fire. I finally began to struggle, kicking and screaming and crying, and doing all the things a scared person did. My head hurt, my eyes stung, perhaps from tears, perhaps from smoke, I couldn't actually tell because I was busy screaming my lungs out.

I heard metallic clatter, a muffled noise- a voice, a sign of something  _human_ , and then something that was decidedly  _not._ A disgusting crack of something fleshly and alive that echoed in my ears; it lingered in my mind long after it was gone. I fell outright silent at its invasive presence occupying my every sense.

_Crack_.

It seemed as if the noise repeated in my mind, over and over again.

Too… not dazed, but  _occupied_  by that terrible sound to notice my situation, I did not realize that danger had passed, so instinct dictated me to struggle once again, to kick my tiny feet with all the impressive energy of a tiny infant, when I was lifted from my crib into a firm grip - the person seemed remarkably unfazed, and truly, a tiny baby struggling probably didn't mean much to a grown person, even barely twitched when I managed to kick into a palm. Well, at least I thought it was a palm.

It… no, he-  _he_  spoke, I was sure he was a man, with a voice somewhere between deep and piercing, but nowhere near rumbling. I shivered, not recognizing a word of this strange language but very much understanding the tone of his voice, commanding as it was.

I decided that I should stop struggling.

By this he appeared pleased, for he spoke no more.

Again the scent of oil stung my nose, heavy and almost etching, but mixed with the scent of leather this time, and a distinct hint of cinder- or ashes? It was then that I finally realized, that it finally clicked in my still tiny brain – I wasn't actually on fire.

It was him. He carried an ever expanding ocean of energy, the fire I had felt eating its way through the world. Nothing burned, no inferno raged. He had been on his path all along. I felt it as the incessant vortex calmed and became dormant, and finally it seemed I could breathe again. No smoke, no overwhelming heat except the one he seemed to naturally emit.

As his inferno retreated a hint of ocean approached beneath its fading waves, once covered by its wild fires; the usually gentle sea breeze brought a wild storm, tearing through the door with hasty steps.

_Mother_ , a voice spoke in my mind, still testing the word. She said something – what emotion was it, what tone? Anger? Worry? Fear?

Perhaps all of them at once. Did she know this man? Did  _I_ know this man?

Something told me,  _yes_. But the reason I did not know. His voice had to be familiar at the very least, and yet it was not. He needed to speak more, I could not recognize it like this.

The storm, too, calmed, much like his vortex, and became the gentle breeze I knew. They spoke again, a back and forth of voices – first she was angry, and he seemed indignant, then she became quiet, and he spoke with a slightly softened voice-

This voice,  _yes_ , this one I knew. I had heard it in the darkness, as a low murmur that vibrated in my ear drums and lingered as a quiet echo.

And then… both were calm. Peace.

Safety.

While the impression lingered I was carefully handed over to my mother, feeling slightly dazed by these stranger things. Somewhere in my mind the sound of a cracking bone still drifted idly, building itself a home in my memory. The shadow that had once haunted me was now gone, no hint of its existence left.

Was this… my father? This man whose presence seemingly swelled to an angry inferno at will and shrank to a tender flame just as easily, who had just before seemingly broken the boundaries of human life… with utter ease, and no regret, for the tides of his fire retreated readily afterwards.

Was he safe? Or would I fall to his anger just as easily? No sane human being  _I_  wanted to associate with killed a baby without remorse, but he also struck down my would-be murderer just as easily, and carried no guilt that I could feel, no inner torment.

But he had done so to save  _me_.

A voice in my mind screamed at me to hide behind him, carrying a feeling from older days that he was safe, safe for  _now_  at least, and that I'd do well to seek shelter in his eclipsing shadow for as long as I could, and that his voice held a power I could not possibly understand in this strange, strange world, where people had presences that felt like fire and oceans and trees.

If I reached out to him now, would he reach back?

I lifted a tiny fist with all the miniscule strength I could muster, reaching into the empty space between us. It was my mother though, who stepped forward, close to him, close enough that  _I_ felt the warmth radiate off of him once more, and close enough that my tiny fingers reached an arm in the darkness.

There was a quiet noise of protest, then silence, and then a gloved finger softly poking my palm.

Somehow, in the midst of this pandemonium of things, I felt elated.


	2. Sweet Dreams

 

The night he returned I dreamed more vividly than ever before.  
They mixed – usually – with flickers of reality as I slipped from sleep to waking and back to sleep again. This night I woke often, fearing to see a shadow above me each time but merely seeing emptiness in its stead.

Was it normal for infants to wake this much?

It was... strange. I felt as if touched by something that hadn't been there before, a lingering presence that now showed itself in my dream as a reflection of what had once been reality. Red eyes peered at me in the dark, never blinking, never fading – the face they belonged to a pale blur behind a thick veil of seemingly... nothingness. Reaching out only revealed empty space between my fingers, and the image fell apart like sifting sand in my hand.

I shivered deeply, the only evidence of its presence a burning cold under my skin that lingered longer still.

As the dream passed I opened my eyes, expecting darkness once again and instead finding gentle light surrounding me, signaling that by now day had chased the night away. I noticed with bewilderment that my crib was moving softly, swinging back and forth slowly in a perfectly soothing rhythm. I tried to utilize my limited eyesight to figure out who was moving the crib, but to my confusion there didn't seem to be anyone in immediate vicinity, at the very least not close enough to be using their arms. Their foot maybe?

Lifting my heavy head was out of the question, and while amusing, kicking my legs didn't exactly do much either, so I raised my voice in what came out as a – admittedly slightly obnoxious – infant wail. Sadly that was pretty much what babies did, and for now it was my only tool of communication. Screaming at people.

The joy.

It didn't take long - something rustled, fabrics most likely, confirming that there had to be someone in the room and the crib wasn't magically moving on its own. The voice I heard respond however... was decidedly not what I had expected.

It was about as quiet as an earthquake and equipped with the same roughness one would anticipate from such an event, the only difference perhaps being that this guy wasn't a force of nature.

I wailed slightly louder, not appreciating strangers next to me completely unattended just after I had almost been murdered, harmlessly rocking my crib or not. The man rushed to my side, his figure a shadow in the midst of my blot-based vision, and while he moved I realized that his presence was the  _other_  torturous one, the one that had arrived with... him.

Father.

He was in the house – I felt it. Somewhere nearby. Moving towards this room like a small tornado now, as if incredibly annoyed by either my wail or the stranger evidently trying to calm me down with soothing whispers. To be frank, I didn't  _feel_  like calming down, uncomfortable memories of my latest experience as a helpless infant pouring out in front of my inner eye like a rapid waterfall. The door was pushed open rather violently not a second later; the home invader vandalizing my crib took a step back and I fell quiet, feeling properly vindicated.

This was, for some reason, not the last time I found strange people in immediate vicinity just after waking up, although this could likely be chalked up to the fact that I slept so much that I spent the majority of my day with it. The second time it happened, I... had been dreaming. Vividly.

There was an ocean, a blanket as azure as the sky, softly rising and falling with the waves. The breath of the world moving its body of life, ever in motion... never the same twice. The calls of the seagulls in my ears and sun glistering on the water, painting marvelous patterns in brilliant white.

There were sea shells scattered across the beach, covered by the sand beneath my feet. Grains gathering and sifting between my toes as I moved, cool against my exposed and pale skin.

There was an echo, a voice that was ever present, a constant melody ringing in my ears. I felt its tender rhythm mending the waves on the shore, giving life to the wind, breath to the world.

Slowly it faded- I held on to it desperately, the sand and the wind and the water, the song in my ears and the sun in the sky, and yet...

Under my feet or above my head or beside me, it did not matter where for it all waned, spiraling into the darkness beyond, the emptiness, the  _nothing_ in my head – the barren space of shade where crimson eyes peered forth, never blinking, never fading. Around the hollow sockets shadows unraveled feather by feather the fleshy and contorted shapes of a massive bird, parting its beak in a deafening screech.

I stumbled over my own feet and fell backwards, fearing the apparition – an illusion, it couldn't be real. I  _knew_  it wasn't.

It was only a moment, a moment of silence and of fear, only a moment before the image shattered in front of my eyes and fell to pieces. Its shapes were torn apart by the sound of a bell-like voice that suddenly boomed through my mind so loudly the space before me seemed to ripple and drift apart.

I trembled, reaching for my heart beating fast in my chest. My eyes fell shut and finally I breathed in the air and the mild scent of smoke that seemed to surround and fill the house I dwelt in, instead of the vague feeling of nothing that had enclosed all my senses only moments earlier.

A dream. Just a dream.

This voice I had not known. It was, for all its beauty and strength, a stranger to me, although its melodic rhythms that danced like waves very much reminded me of my mother's, and the pitches that rang like singing bells.

I fully expected the familiar environment of blurry colors when I opened my eyes and yet I startled as I did so, for I was greeted with the sight of two red and thoroughly malformed dots above me.

_No._

A noise made of confusion and fear crawled forth from my throat, unwanted and barely restrained. My mind noticed only slowly that what I was seeing were the distorted shapes of crimson hair, not someone's eyes staring at me through the veil once more.

Okay. Let's calm down.

I knew one of these people. She was my mother, with her seaside presence that had followed me into my dreams and created an image of peace and beauty. The thought of being startled by her seemed silly now.

The other however I did not know. She carried a similar feel to her, with the same sense of waves gently lapping against my mind. There was something foreign, something unknown, a gentle breeze unlike my mother's. She spoke with the voice that had shattered the bird in my dream, calm but authoritative, yet strangely soft – the melody of the sea.

I knew her, and yet I didn't. It was a strange feeling.

She appeared many times after this one incident, no matter whether I was awake or asleep during the time of her arrival. The shared trait of ridiculously red hair and the similar feeling to their presences led me to believe that she was family on my mother's side, though to which extent I couldn't guess.

A voice whispered in my head that I should know her, that I had seen her before. When I wasn't sleeping I was combing through my memories, trying to figure out an answer to this riddle. It was like that one word constantly slipping away from you, the word of which you knew the meaning but not the actual sound – such was the ache of trying to grasp a memory slowly drifting away.

It was driving me  _mad_.

I needed to know where I was, why I was here,  _how_. Who were these people, why did I know them?

I had figured out by now that the language they were speaking was Japanese, which admittedly was a little baffling. I didn't understand any of it- well, not quite, I understood some, a very,  _very_  limited range of words – but Japanese was a language from  _my_  world. In my world people didn't feel like... like nature. People didn't feel like anything at all!

Then there was the fact that during my time here so far I hadn't heard a single phone, no TV, not even a radio, no  _music._ Heck, I still couldn't tell whether they had light bulbs.

I seriously considered whether I had somehow traveled through time or this place was just really old-fashioned.

Or... none of the above.

But really, which place I knew of was Japanese and had brightly red-haired people, and presences that felt like nature? Well, none that I  _remembered._  Funny that.

Asking oneself that question while one's memories were inaccessible was largely futile and a waste of time. I  _knew_  I was familiar with this place, I just couldn't grasp how, and that was a terrible annoyance at best and a maddening obstacle at worst.

The dreams of red eyes came often, not always hostile but ever bizarre. Some were simply what one would call neutral, like the pale face from my first dream staring at me from afar. Incredibly unsettling, but it had never done more than that. Sometimes they were there even when the dream itself was hardly dark. A bat, a dog, a horse... a bird.

The bird, yes. That one had absolutely  _not_  been friendly. I wondered whether those dreams meant anything, but felt that, as always, the answer was hiding behind the veil around my memories I simply couldn't lift. Sometimes I felt like I had almost grasped it, only for it to slip away.

Another time I woke to a stranger close to me was perhaps... the most intriguing in this regard, if only for that particular feeling of familiarity he had carried.

It had been some time after the other two. My vision was growing sharper, but the passage of time was lost to me regardless. I was still hoping for clues from my recently absent memory, and still found none.

Faces were growing less blurry. I realized this while opening my eyes, slipping out of my bleak dream, and recognizing my mother's irides as a vibrant, bright blue hovering above me.

Beautiful. Prettier than the washed-out rainfall I had once called my eye color.

That was unfortunately the moment I heard a sharp and piercing voice nearly thunder through space and towards my fragile ear drums, which led me to make a small squeak of, dare I say it,  _fear_.

Mother whipped her head around and pulled her arms around me, assessing the danger or... glaring in annoyance at the door. Her presence began to move in light ripples against my mind.

The fact that someone marched right through it and she merely kept following the new person with her stare made me believe rather firmly that it was the latter, although with those people here it seemed one could never be  _truly_  certain. I had, after all, already witnessed someone kill without a care.

Times like these made me curse the fact that I didn't understand a thing. They began arguing, their voices going back and forth rather bitingly, and I was left with only reading their tone of voice.

Who the hell was this?

I grew increasingly wary, trying to seem even smaller than I already was. Whether the guy was a danger or not, he clearly didn't get along with my mother too well right now, and I didn't know whether she could defend herself.

Eventually I twitched when a third voice joined the slowly developing chaos, calm but commanding, uttering but a single word.

"Izuna."

I recognized that voice as Father's.

The stranger turned around, staring at my father long and – at least I thought so – rather defiantly, although that could be my imagination, it's not like I could really read his face. His presence however swirled like a cold storm of ash, making me feel like my blood was freezing in my veins.

_Izuna._

Izuna had to be his name. I had no basis for this other than him reacting to the word, even though it could mean many things, like "stop it" or "shut up", but there was a strange gut feeling that I believed to be a memory trying to reach through the veil. The word felt familiar somehow, like I had once known it.

Or perhaps this was wishful thinking. I don't know.

Father said something I once again didn't understand, to which the stranger responded in a calm voice – uncomfortably calm, not the nice and gentle kind of calm, or the... calming kind of calm. No, it rather felt like someone explaining to you in detail how they were going to remove your organs from your body and sell them for profit.

There was silence, a state which in this setup I decidedly disliked, and had a clock been in this room one could have heard the seconds pass by. The stranger- no,  _Izuna_ , slowly turned his head, glance seemingly drifting through the room, until it eventually came to a slow halt on a point anywhere in my direction.

Well. On  _me_.

I nearly stopped breathing. So far I didn't like this guy, and from the way his presence kept swirling the feeling was mutual, unless I had turned reasonably paranoid – which, granted, was not unlikely. I had always been distrustful of strangers, even though this one had a presence much like... my father did, and the same raven mane, and he was even nearly the same height. A little shorter maybe.

I hoped with all my heart that they weren't twins. Or just brothers. That would already be bad enough.

He homed in on me, leading me to make a noise that died in my throat before ever having the honor of experiencing the world. The man lowered himself just enough to be able to peer at my face in uncomfortable vicinity and gave me the longest stare I ever had to hold in my not-so-long infant life. It was so distressing that I nearly expected his eyes to flash red any second. While that sounded extremely ridiculous in theory I for some reason felt like it wasn't, and it was hard to tell whether that was nightmare-induced paranoia or another memory pushing through.

I deeply hoped it wasn't the latter. My dreams were full of red eyes, I didn't need them in reality.

He just kept staring, eyes pitch black – like a pit of tar. An endless void. So close to my face I could see a dangerous intelligence shine in his eyes, a strange steely glimmer that spoke "I kill people who annoy me" with startling authenticity. I didn't doubt for a second that this guy did exactly that, and on a regular basis.

The storm of ash had quieted and receded to a gentle rain. He finally rose back to his full height and returned to staring at the other people in the room, then calmly began to address my father and walked through the door with an impressive lack of urgency. Silence followed, likely only a few seconds long but carrying the feel of minutes, before my father followed him through the door and I felt mother breathe a sigh of relief.

"Izuna," she muttered and reached for her temple, sounding distinctly exhausted, as if this saddened her more than anything else. I was certain now that Izuna was his name, though what his issue with my mother was I couldn't tell.

I just knew that I hoped to not find any more weird people close to me while waking up. The three I had found by now were already bad enough, who knows who else was lurking in this place.


	3. Panther Paws

I have a statement to make. It is a very basic statement, and thus probably doesn't sound very intelligent, but believe me when I say that it is one-hundred percent true.

Infancy. Is.  _Boring._

Hungry? Wail a bit until someone notices you. Scared? The same. Bored? The same! But do people play with you? No, of course not. They don't think you understand them – granted, I really don't - so at most they babble at you and play "Where's the baby?"  
Hell, even that was already entertainment in comparison to what I usually did. The guy with the loud voice was a  _master_  at this, seriously. It's like he had practiced this all his life.

I had nothing to do besides sleeping, eating and generally being extremely helpless, so I focused on the things happening in my environment, partially to entertain myself and partially because I was paranoid and wanted to hone my senses. If I could already sense people, why not practice it?

Even though I couldn't understand much I concentrated on the words, too. In which context they were spoken, by who, when... it was like trying to solve a puzzle while a majority of the pieces were actually turned over. I gained some understanding of basic sentence structures, but my vocabulary remained remarkably limited.

Regardless there were a few things I learned. For one,  _my name._

It was Kasai. I had no idea what it meant or who had chosen it for me, but it was the word they addressed me with, whispering gently, smiling, laughing. They were happy to have me, I was liked,  _wanted_.

It was... new.

Father rarely held me. I think he preferred just watching when he was actually around, which was, to say, not often. Oh, he was always  _somewhere_ , his presence was hard to ignore, but he rarely was  _specifically_  with me. Distant, even when he was present.

I... didn't know what to make of it, though I suppose with how reluctant he'd been from the start I shouldn't have expected anything else.

Mother's name was Umiko. Again, I had no clue what it meant, but it was the name her red-haired sister in crime addressed her with, and in return she was called Mito. That name actually rang a bell, a very distant, incredibly  _annoying_  bell, like a shrill and tiny drill in my head. Someone constantly screaming "Hellooo" with a high-pitched crescendo at the end wouldn't have been half as annoying.

She was married to the man who for some reason spent more time playing with me than my own father. At least I  _thought_  they were married, observing how they interacted with each other. I wondered whether they had children... whether I'd get swarmed with tiny nature-presence-babies. That thought was as amusing as it was terrifying.

Izuna... unfortunately didn't disappear back to the hole he'd crawled out of. In fact, he stuck around so closely that I could feel his ashen presence faintly gleam like an afterimage of the mind. This thought seriously disheartened me for I feared that my up to this point – first week excluded – quiet family life had come to an end the moment he had rudely marched into the room and started arguing with my mother like he owned the place.

I pushed away the terrifying thought that maybe he  _did_  own the place, unlikely as it seemed.

Sometimes I heard him exchange words with Father, although rarely able to figure out the topics of their conversations, and the tone varied from aggressive to calm to... mildly warm. I was reluctant to use the word tender to describe any of these people.

He called him brother. Older brother, I believe.

It was a saddening revelation, I tell you. My sense of victory from having gained an understanding of that word had been short-lived, struck dead by the thought that we were indeed related.

Many visitors came and went. People whose presences felt similar, familiar, like they were all family and yet not. Some felt like something was missing that others had. Sometimes they stayed for quite a while, sometimes they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.

My vision developed fully, allowing me to recognize my environment with full clarity – and almost surreally sharp. I didn't remember my vision having ever been  _this_  clear, although even back in my old life I had worn glasses, so chances were I wouldn't know anyway.

With vision finally came memories, and with memories came the realization.

And what a  _horrible_  realization it was, and how sudden it had come.

Let me elaborate.

Sometimes things felt familiar, and those I categorized as 'important', but overall I still didn't really have a clue of my whereabouts, that is,  _at first_. The place looked... old-fashioned, with very little furniture, decoration or, well, anything pleasant to the eye, although the walls themselves were somewhat pretty. They were colored in soft earthen hues, and I had always liked those.

I began to explore whenever granted the freedom of spending time on the very not-soft floor made of something awful _._  I had no flipping idea what it was, I just knew that learning how to crawl on it was thoroughly unpleasant. I occasionally face-planted on it while trying to move forward, which was as uncomfortable as it was infuriating – I had never been the most elegant person, but to be this awkward was simply dreadful and offended what little pride I had.

Father seemed to be a busy man, whether that was so because he sought work or work sought him was not knowledge given or shown to me, and I was somewhat tired of making assumptions. A strange day it was indeed when I found myself in his care alone.

Mother wasn't there. I couldn't feel her anywhere and although people somehow possessed the skill to keep their presences hidden from me she had never purposefully done so before. Admittedly I felt... scared without her being close. All this time she hadn't left me once, and I had grown so very used to her presence that her absence now seemed threatening. The idea that she was out of town for one reason or another wasn't inconceivable though, and Father didn't seem worried, so I decided not to angst over this either.

I found myself on the floor again, left to my own and simple devices. This room was new to me – I didn't recognize it at all. For the most part I hadn't really left my own chamber, so this was some real sense of exploration here!

The door to the outside was left open, allowing sunlight to stream into the room freely and letting me see a glance of the outside world for once, which had been a rare occurrence so far. The mild breeze that brushed against my cheeks was warm and fresh and smelled of leaves.

I felt reminded of late summer.

The inside seemed almost... bleak in comparison. Decoration was scarce safe for a slim, elegantly bent sword proudly resting upon a display rack in a small niche of the wall. It was so unique and so central in this room that it automatically caught my glance.

I blinked in awe. The blade was sheathed in its scabbard, black and carefully decorated with red ornaments, painting an even pattern that somehow stood out in this room of monotone.

My glance drifted towards the man currently tasked with watching over me. He sat on a dark pillow located in front of a small and compact table, legs crossed and back arrow-straight, seeming rather engrossed by whatever he was reading, face barely moving or showing any emotion at all. His hands rested on his knees though, giving him a semi-relaxed look despite his posture.

Was it his? Could he wield it?

It seemed he wasn't really paying attention to me, as if his mind was entirely elsewhere, drifting idly anywhere but in this room. I silently debated if trying to get closer to the sword was a feasible endeavor or whether I'd get caught and...  _scolded._

Oh, the risk was real. Life or death.

Joking aside, I didn't like the thought of making him angry or... even just annoying him, and he seemed like an easily annoyed person. On the other hand, he hardly reacted to anything at all. In fact, most of the time when I saw him he had that stoic expression plastered on his face and even though his presence seemed to get a little agitated now and then he rarely allowed himself to show it, at least not while I was around. He was so thoroughly unpredictable that any prognosis I could make was in the end merely an unfounded assumption.

Still...

I slowly began to move, bravely crawling forth like a true heroine. I don't think my movements qualified as quiet, but when I threw a careful glance back at his face he was still staring at the scroll on his terribly tiny table, barely moving at all. If I hadn't felt his presence I could probably have considered him lifeless, deadly still as he was.

I finally reached the display rack, and – with some considerable effort – performed a feat I thought someone my supposed age probably shouldn't be capable of. I pulled myself up with the help of the raised surface, somehow managing to stand on two very wobbly legs.

Success!

The scabbard was... beautiful. Etched into it were three comma-like shapes in crimson, arranged in a perfect circle, sitting at the center of a sprawling pattern that beckoned my thoughts to linger.

Tomoe.

The word softly drifted through my mind, a ghost of older days. Those were  _Tomoe_ , and they were a symbol. A symbol of something terrible and terrifying and beautiful, the marks in their wake as crimson as the paint that colored them.

The images of red eyes unblinking in the dark were fading from my mind no more, those memories of dreams - dancing on the shards of older memories once forgotten.

I felt my vision blur, pictures drifting in and out of mind, the inner sight dominant as my true vision fell dormant. And yet, at the corner of my eye I caught glimpse of something bright hidden beyond the sword, painted on the display case with so vibrant that the colors lingered in my mind. I snapped out of my mental absence, thoughts crashing back to reality by the chains of curiosity. And still somewhere inside I knew what this was, and knew that it meant little good.

Shuffling to the side to look past the scabbard I discovered it – this thing I knew, feeling a literal waterfall of pictures crash through my mind straight to my mental center, where it took root and occupied every cell.

I saw  _it._

A stylized fan it was, its top half a red and perfectly-shaped half-circle, the bottom part white and extending to a short, handle-like end. For the lack of a better comparison... it looked like a ping-pong bat cut in half.

Pride. Pain. The ethereal presence of blood and hatred made flesh, made real- given a  _heart_ , a body, a mind.

_Uchiha._

No. Surely this was a dream.

Uchiha. The word screeched and clawed at me, demanding that I remember, demanding that I know. Demanding that I see where I am.

I  _saw_. Mother of God, did I see.

I'd had dreams like this before. This wouldn't be the first time. Maybe I was comatose. Maybe I was dreaming up a better life. Anything but this being reality.

The crest silently laughed at me as I stood there frozen, helpless under the flood of memories that suddenly took my mind by force.

This simply could not be.

Oh but  _of course_  they spoke Japanese. Of  _course_  they felt like nature. Of course there were people with vibrantly red hair and people with jet-black eyes and lowlifes who'd kill a baby.

Of course they would.

They were  _ninja_.

I lost my grip, experiencing a moment of sudden panic at the realization that I didn't have the proper motion skills to not land horribly yet, and already feared the worst that could possibly happen to a poor baby with a heavy head. I saw myself hitting the hard floor with my skull cracking open like a ripe melon as gravity pulled me into its sweet embrace, and I somehow found it in me to wail in distress, desperately reaching out for the display rack that had given me stability only moments before.

My stupid stumpy arms were too short.

_Help._

The skull-shattering impact I feared ended up suspiciously soft. If I hadn't known better I would've thought someone had replaced the floor with cotton candy while I wasn't looking and I was now lying on a soft cloud of sugary sweetness.

Oh. Wait.

Oh  _no_.

I glanced up, realizing whose face  _probably_  lingered there above me, and flinched as I peered into pitch-black eyes. They were unwavering, steely, cold – the embers that gleamed in his heart scarcely reached his eyes.

I had landed softly and safely on his legs, hadn't heard him get up nor approach, hadn't heard him move at all, hadn't  _felt_  it either. When he had sat down behind me or why, or why he hadn't done anything before, I  _didn't know._

Those eyes... I couldn't look away from those eyes.

He seemed slightly puzzled, perhaps wondering whether it was normal for little babies to try this kind of thing. Honestly, I kind of expected him not to know.

After all,  _Madara Uchiha_  had never been described as a father.

I remembered now, oh yes. I remembered him, I remembered those eyes – those eyes that shouldn't be his. Were they? Were they his own? They were pitch-black all the same.

I took a shaky breath, overwhelmed by thoughts racing in my head.

_I am dreaming._

Surely,  _surely_  this was a dream. It  _couldn't be_ anything else. Naruto wasn't real. Fictional stories simply weren't real.

I. was. Dreaming.

Madara Uchiha  _wasn't real._

I very nearly screamed those words in my head, as if trying to convince myself, trying to convince  _the world_  that yes, this truly wasn't real, that I had clearly hit my head too hard, that I was seeing things.

That had to be it. I was hallucinating. This wasn't Madara Uchiha.

If nothing else, for the simple fact that  _he had never had children._

I startled when he reached for the blade - a  _Katana,_  I silently realized – and unsheathed it with one swift move of his arm, such ease to it, such a sense of casual routine-

Oh gods, he wasn't going to kill me, was he?

No, that was ridiculous. He had no reason to do that after saving my life. I was his daughter, right? I was his child! He wouldn't... he wouldn't do that...

There was nothing but serenity written one his face while he carefully weighted the sword, fingers curled around the handle in a relaxed grip. I watched the blade, its silvery color, it's dulled sheen in the light. This thing looked like it didn't just exist for decoration purposes, but I wouldn't really know. Given that it was located in the study of  _this_  man – not-Madara I mean – it probably wasn't. I had not forgotten my first meeting with him, not forgotten the sound of a breaking neck.

At the mere memory of it anxiety spread in my chest, an old  _friend_  of mine I had not missed, not now, not ever.

He returned the blade to its scabbard and re-positioned it on the display rack, saying something in a quiet voice I barely understood. I didn't know, nor did I really understand the purpose of this little display. Had he meant to show me something?

Oh sure, show an unsheathed and open blade to a little kid. Sure. Why not.

No, this still wasn't real.

The legs I was still lying on began to move while two steady hands lifted me from his lap and returned me to my original crawling position on the uncomfortable floor, though far away from the Katana this time. I guess that was message enough. Not-Madara then returned to his awfully tiny work desk, leaving me alone on the floor.

Alone with my thoughts. My  _delusions._

I sat there frozen as the seconds passed, completely ignoring my environment and whatever happened to occur in it, words in my head taking priority over everything.

This wasn't real. This wasn't real. It was decidedly, absolutely, simply not. Real.

This room wasn't real. The Katana wasn't real. The desk wasn't real.

Nothing here was a real.

Just a dream. A very long-lasting, very bad dream.

I didn't want to live in this world. Honestly, who did?! People kept  _dying_  here- died more than usual I mean, or wait, no, sure they died back home too, but-

I had almost died as _a baby_  already! Shit, I'd probably go insane sooner or later, it's not like I was especially resilient mentally, I had been a messed up kid in my last life already.

No, not last life. Current life. This wasn't real.

This wasn't-

_Erk._

The world started moving as someone with a less than steady grip carelessly lifted me from the floor, startling me out of my currently already dulled wits.

I was so surprised, I even forgot to annoy everyone with my wail.

After a few seconds of confusion on both my and my carrier's behalf I found myself on a small shoulder, held in place by hands that barely felt much larger than mine. Their movements seemed wobbly and unsteady, far removed from what I had grown used to.

I was being carried off by a  _small boy_.

Heavens. Help.

The kid began to move – seeming rather excited, too, for his much weaker presence swirled like ash and embers.

Don't drop me don't drop me oh God.

With tiny, hasty steps he ran through the open door and into the grassy fields, ignoring or unaware of my steadily growing angst over seeing the ground pass by under me. Powers above and below, today was  _not_  a good day for someone with the motor skills of a brick. And while I did enjoy the feeling of sunlight and wind and the scent of leaves and wow I was outside-

Help! I was being kidnapped! By a  _kid_! Was no one going to stop this?  
Father?

Anyone?

He kept running, clearly having a destination outside that was as of now entirely unknown to me – after all I didn't know the outside world at all. I somehow managed to make a scared noise, digging my fists into the fabrics of his clothes.

No? No one coming? Okay then, leave me here alone...

I resigned myself to my fate and gave up trying to understand why no one had decided to stop this kid. He wouldn't get too far... probably. Right?

… I hoped.

Eventually he stopped and I took a shaky breath, realizing that I hadn't been dropped and was still in one piece. The kid actually had a surprisingly good grip for someone so small, now that I thought about it. I could have gotten hurt so easily here...

I hadn't, though.

Maybe this kid was a ninja?

No, I had just established that ninja weren't real. Within the boundaries of my  _delusion_  this kid could be a ninja, though.

He put me down on the grassy ground somewhat carefully, allowing me to feel the soft texture beneath my fingers, brushing against my skin and tickling my limbs. It was warm and dry enough for me to feel comfortable far more than I had felt on the hard ground inside. For the first time I got a clear view of the  _actual_  world around me, and all things considered... it didn't look much different from home.

I saw trees. A pond. Flowers.

This was a  _garden._  A really nice garden.

Behind us stood a rather small and cozy house, not the large, sprawling thing I had imagined in my head. I didn't know how this worked with my idea of hundreds of people walking around though, specifically the feeling of people who weren't... trained for combat. I  _knew_  I had felt them, but where did they live, if not in our house?

The kid who had abducted me to this serene place only moments before seemed proud of himself, a grin reaching from ear to ear splitting his chubby little face. His pitch-black, almond-shaped eyes shone with a kind of childish joy as he excitedly stepped on the spot, staring at me with an open expression I could only describe as bright anticipation. The hair framing his face with messy strands was as black as my father's, receiving a slightly blue sheen in the waning sunlight and giving him a fairly wild look.

Were we related? It was the only thing I could think of, looking at his appearance.

I didn't get to look for long, because he suddenly turned around and just... wandered off, leaving me alone out here in the grass. I blinked for a few seconds, slowly realizing what had happened.

Oh.

Oh. No. No, this wasn't cool. Kid, come back!

Nooo, please!

I didn't want to be alone out here in an open field, where I was a perfect target for kidnappers, rain, birds of prey, dogs, ca-… cats?

I froze on the spot as I saw a massive black shadow speed around the corner, sprinting forward on four long and slender legs carrying a slim body, moving like a well-oiled machine on the hunt for babies to kill.

Literally, because it leapt at me in a lengthy and high arc before I could make so much as a noise.

I was going to die.

Again.

See, this is what I meant, this world had it out for people like me! If this was real, if this was  _actually_  real-

I couldn't even panic, everything happened so fast. I just saw the thing moving and saw myself... dead. Closed my eyes, sending a last prayer to the powers that be that this time I wouldn't be reborn in a world full of psychopathic murderers or... hell, that I'd wake up from this nightmare already, and hoped for the best.

I literally had no luck.


	4. Sanguine

I hate cats.

This wasn't my end, no. That would've been a little sad. It was, however, a rather defining moment.

I heard a loud roar, an  _angry_  roar, or rather a remarkably petulant sound, and a noise I'd describe as "kicked puppy",except this was "kicked monster kitten". Carefully, I opened one eye.

Cat gone.

Okay, this was rather anticlimactic.

I dared to look up, slowly turning my head to look at the presence lingering behind me. I knew who it was, really. There was no need to look, but I did it anyway. Perhaps because a part of me didn't want to believe it, not as it was at least, not as I had just realized it to be. Perhaps a part of me hoped to see something else.

It was Izuna, with his pitch-black eyes and his somber expression, calmly staring down the little kid that had just disappeared on me and left me alone to get eaten by a monster cat - now standing behind a tree, looking rightfully ashamed with his big dark eyes.

"Shigure," he droned, voice low and tense and kind of making me want to crawl away. Somehow I yearned for the safety of father's presence.

The little kid lowered his head, staring at the ground in shame. "Sorry, father," he muttered, and that was about all I understood. Izuna's following words were lost on me, and the moment allowed me to slide back into my dilemma.

Izuna.

Izuna was  _alive._ Walking, although sometimes stiffly so, not blind, in fact, he seemed to be able to see quite well.

I glanced at the boy again.

Shigure?

It was a pretty name, no doubt. And yet...

I blinked.

Did I have a cousin?

* * *

 

I don't know how anyone else would've felt after being given a second lease at life. I thought after a while that I had been given a second  _chance_. A new beginning. So much had gone wrong after all.

But if you one day suddenly realized that you are stuck within the world of your favorite book from childhood, how would you feel?

Would you think you are dreaming?

I had considered that, obviously. My fierce denial was proof of that. But dreams don't last forever, and I was an occasionally lucid dreamer – I knew how to recognize dreams after a while, even if I wanted to pretend that I didn't. You couldn't read text in dreams, clocks would usually show inaccurate garbage. None of that applied here, not really. I could look at text. I couldn't read it, but it stayed the same. It was coherent.

Much to my dismay... this wasn't a dream.

But was it real?

Now, hours of pondering later, I wanted it to be. The alternative... what was the alternative? A computer? Virtual reality? Hell no. I had no memory of agreeing to that. That was some Matrix shit, and I had never actually seen that movie.

With silent dismay I glanced at my mother's face, thoughts beating against my mind.

I didn't know her. No, I did, but I didn't  _know_  her. She was not a character from... there. It was strange to think, to imagine, that a world existed beyond the panels of a page, that those panels could even portray a world, a world that truly existed?

Were our minds so powerful that worlds came to be just by our will?

No one would answer me these questions, I knew that. It was a somber realization – and I felt surprisingly little despair now – to know that this world was now my home. It was a cruel place to be, it was a cruel  _time_ to be.

But I was here.

I couldn't even begin to explain  _why_. The fact that everything was upside down probably had something to do with it, like for example  _Madara Uchiha_  over there being himself and not on his way to burn down the village with a giant fox by now.

He was casually conversing with my mother, which was another mystery unsolved to me. The two did not seem particularly in love, though I was hardly an expert, and maybe even slept in separate rooms. Izuna? He was alive. He wasn't blind. He had a son. That was a deviation from canon as well.

… Was it? I didn't know whether he'd had children. In fact, the poor guy had shown up so little that his eyes had had more screentime than he himself.

Regardless, this was a completely surreal situation, topped off by the fact that I could  _feel_  chakra. That weird presence I used to describe people with.

What was I supposed to do here?

* * *

 

I spent many hours pondering this – probably because I had many of them at my disposal. Toddlers don't do much, really.

That little kid that was supposed to be my cousin tended to dance around me with a kind of excitement I couldn't even begin to match. He evidently seemed to love his father, and yet I couldn't unite his presence with the perceptions stuck in my mind, as if I kept seeing a mirage that obviously wasn't quite real.

Izuna... remained an enigma. I couldn't hate him as much knowing who he was, but I rapidly realized that my first impressions were hard to overcome by experiences I had made in my prior life – Izuna was Izuna, the mean uncle, not Izuna, the brother of Madara, who I had liked so much.

It was strange. I knew so much from flat pages, but they weren't able to seem more real than what I was seeing here and now. If I had come here remembering everything from the start, would I be able to call Madara my father?

It was a quiet day when I found myself adventuring again, this time without cats or little kids kidnapping me. No, instead mother was painting – she was an incredible artist, and I saw myself in awe by her skills with colors that meant little by themselves. I had been an artist too, in my prior life.

It was during my idle observance of a pattern on the floor that I felt Izuna's presence approach, and the door flew open before I could even make a sound.

He didn't exactly seem pleased.

Despite my expectations however he didn't bark at my mother, complain or throw a tantrum, he merely stared at her, eyes getting stuck on the half-painted picture for a mere second before changing focus.

I still didn't understand what they were saying. Language is a freaky thing. I filtered out something about injury, and some weird sentences that I heard them say rather often, and after that mother got up, brushed some dust off her kimono and left the room as elegantly as a queen.

In the corner of my eye I saw Izuna sigh, then lower himself to the ground slowly, rubbing his side all the while.

"Just use a cane," he muttered with a sharp edge to his tone and snorted, as if disgusted. I tried to wrap my head around the sentence I had managed to decipher somehow, but mostly I was both confused and curious.

Cane?

Man, he seemed depressed.

Somehow my brain opted to shut down and I suddenly, completely thoughtlessly decided to crawl up to him, which he took note of with a slight frown.

"What is it?" he asked, voice seeming tired and weary.

Oh, nothing. Really.

I stared at him for a few seconds, pondering what could have soured his mood even more than usual, if he didn't even have it in him to glare at his dear niece.

"Esuna."

He blinked.

Couldn't help it, I part snorted, part chuckled – that weird noise little babies make when they laugh which sounded absolutely ridiculous and a lot less dignified than I would have liked to sound, but it at least seemed to have a positive effect, for Izuna tilted his head, seeming more like a confused cat than a menacing shinobi for a second.

"Esuna," I repeated, knowing indeed that the pronunciation was far from on point. Tongues are fickle things.

"Aa," he eventually muttered, lips twitching softly. "That's my name."

I smiled- tried to smile. Didn't even know what I was doing here but it worked somewhat, I suppose – because eventually, preceded by another blink of confusion, he reluctantly smiled too.

As far as I'm aware, Izuna never told my father that his name had been my first word. I could never figure out why, but it seemed to ring with a certain sense of indulgence somehow, in the most innocent sense.

It was simply his memory alone.

* * *

 

Izuna sometimes needed a cane to walk. I realized this only as I learned to walk myself and one day, being a little too careless and a little too yearning for freedom, required support to not completely topple over and fall flat on my face. Instinctively I held on to the next thing close enough to be an impromptu pillar and Izuna, being his valiant self, ended up taking my entire weight. He proceeded to hiss in pain as I grabbed his side. He didn't punish nor reprimand me, merely waited patiently as I let go, finding my own balance once again.

Somehow it occurred to me only then that a long time ago, a certain Senju Tobirama had rammed a sword through his side, and that technically he would've been dead, and that now he was alive – suffering from what was perhaps no less than a permanent injury.

He was crippled.

Somehow the thought startled me more than most things I had felt and experienced in this world.

* * *

 

Hashirama was another mystery.

For one, his wife was my aunt, making him my uncle by marriage, meaning my mother was his sister-in-law. Spooky.

He showed up sometimes, and the first time I realized it was him I stared at him for an hour, trying to wrap my head around his presence. When he noticed my unwavering stare he grew a flower between my toes without barely moving and grinned like he had achieved world peace – which, granted, his village had for the moment - when I jumped into the air momentarily from the weird sensation under my foot, not to mention the strange feeling of sensing the chakra move. It was  _weird_  chakra – it created life. No other nature transformation was capable of that.

I plucked that flower when no one else was looking, and later stored it in my room.

Hashirama brought a child along one day – an infant, barely smaller than me, but definitely younger. It didn't surprise me that he had children, after all Tsunade existed in canon, but it  _did_  surprise me that aloof and distant Madara had somehow managed to score before him.

Unless, of course, Hashirama was hiding an army of toddlers at home without me knowing.

The child was named Kawarama – I pondered that name for about an hour also, realizing that he had named his first son after his youngest deceased brother. Bittersweet.

* * *

 

Shigure was a handful. Prone to pranking, annoying or just generally being a pest. He liked cats, hiding bugs in my room and pushing various people into the fish pond. The pond I could forgive, the spiders less so.

Let's not even ponder the possible consequences of throwing a four-year-old into a pond and instead focus on the fact that my father was there to fish me out of it while giving Shigure the sharpest glare known to man. For a clan that is familiar with the social ailment that is the Sharingan let me assure you a glare from Madara is the scariest thing in the world.

Later he assured my father that it hadn't actually be his intention to drown me, he just wanted to teach me how to swim. Yeah, right.

* * *

 

"Kawarama, you're not supposed to eat snails!"

The toddler halted momentarily, staring at me with honest, open confusion.

"Eh?"

Then he stuffed the slimy thing into his mouth, and Shigure burst into a fit of bellowing laughter heard from beyond the fish pond.

Goddamnit.

* * *

 

The fish in the pond belong to Mom. They were a gift of the Uzumaki delegation, and turning down such an expensive gift was highly impolite, so a pond had been dug and filled with water in less than an hour, employing the special skills of run-of-the-mill shinobi.

Regardless, I was told my father had grumbled something about expensive maintenance of useless luxury pets.

I don't know whether he really minded their cost or was just pissed that he had to keep fish in his home, which he hated, and  _Uzumaki_  fish no less. Heaven forbid.

I have mentioned the pond a lot, haven't I? For some reason it had a minor role of importance in this family, if only because you could annoy people with it, and my mother painted something involving it every other day.

Father once threatened to feed the fish to Izuna's cats, and mother then told him that he's full of shit and threw ink at his face.

As awesome as that was, I am not sure why this house is still standing.

* * *

 

"Girl, that's not how you hold a brush."

"I'm sorry, father."

I was left-handed and so I was used to forming a hook with my hand to write properly. Somehow holding a brush wasn't very agreeable with my desire to write western letters.

"Again."

Learning how to write? Not entertaining.

He grabbed the brush and wrote two perfect lines of characters on the sheet – with one hand each. Curse him and his ambidexterity.

* * *

 

One day father took me outside to see his birds.

The muffled sound of a raptor's screech numbed my ears temporarily as we approached the mews located not far behind the house.

I silently followed after my father, not sure what awaited me behind the door. I knew that he was into falconry, I knew that he liked to keep birds. Part of it rather excited me, but at the same time I was tiny next to him, and birds were big. And yet, silently and quietly I followed as I was told to do, hiding in his shadow like a scared cat. Somehow the last years had instilled this desire to do as I was told, even though I had been as rebellious as they come once upon a time. Perhaps some day I would be again, but really, who wanted to rebel against Madara just like that?

Not me, that's for sure.

"Wait here," he instructed coolly, and I immediately stood still. I felt my heart pounding in my chest somehow, not even sure what I was anticipating so anxiously that my inner system went into overdrive. It was only a bird.

But something in my mind knew, it wasn't the bird that scared me.

I watched his figure reemerge from the door and tightly clutched the large and mostly improvised leather glove fitted around my tiny hand. I was too small to have any real gloves yet, but leaving my hands unprotected could be fatal. On his arm sat a brown-colored and distinctively slender bird of prey, watchful eyes silently glancing at me, our environment, everything. The color was... striking, a deep amber reminding me more of fire than tree sap.

It barely moved while taking in the world, and eventually made a soft noise not unlike a chirp, but with such a harsh quality to it that calling it such would seem far too delicate.

"This is Ikuji," he spoke, voice making me snap to attention.

"Your hand."

I shuddered, realizing what he was about to do – yet I stretched out my arm anyway, anxiously closing my eyes.

"Look at her."

Goddamnit.

I reopened my eyes, finding myself face to face with a bird larger than the length of my arm. I expected the creature's entire weight to send my hand crushing into the ground, but instead I realized upon her hopping on my leather protection that she barely weighed a thing.

A small grin made its way to my lips. I was holding a bird.

Father crouched beside me, reducing the distance in height between us by a landslide, allowing us to nearly see eye to eye. I alternated between looking at him and looking at the bird, suppressing the desire to stroke her smooth-looking head.

"What do you use her for?" I eventually dared to ask, feeling on one hand the desire to fill the silence, on the other the desire to connect with this man. As much as I had grown to love this family, I was oftentimes scared of disappointing him more than anything else.

I was scared of failure.

"Tracking, mostly." He reached out to stroke the bird's chin, for lack of a better word. Did birds have chins? "Ikuji is not a messenger bird, even if idiots would have you believe otherwise."

I pondered that for a second. I knew that messenger hawks were a thing in this universe, even if I didn't know how that worked. They weren't pigeons.

"But you have messengers?" I asked tentatively.

"Aa."

Short answer. Precise, I guess?

"How?"

His eyebrows rose as if my question was a particularly strange one. "We have been breeding hawks for decades."

That didn't really explain it, but okay.

I could have asked all kinds of precise questions now, but from a four-year-old that would likely seem a little strange, so I restrained myself and instead decided to lean my head against his arm, warm as it was. The scent of ash clung to his clothes like a shadow. It was a short-circuit reaction, but eventually I was rewarded when he briefly ruffled my hair before relieving me off the weight of the bird on my wrist.

With a last pat on my back he rose and returned the falcon back to its mew while I was left feeling torn between pride swelling in my chest and a strange sense of loss.

* * *

 

"You know, Madara, I know you won't like me asking this, but-"

I was practicing my Katakana in the living room, only idly listening to my family talk. Hashirama was present for a 'short' chat, likely leeching off Mom's sweet-ass tea.

Like the Hokage had nothing else to do.

"Then don't ask it," I heard Izuna hiss sharply. Oh dear. Beef.

I glanced at Mom giving him a disapproving stare, but Izuna hardly seemed to give a shit. Breathing the same air as Hashirama appeared to be a grievous insult to his pride as it was, and Izuna was a  _very_  proud person. He was loyal, but his ego could fill the village north to south.

"Is she the clan's heir?"

For a few seconds there was silence.

"No."

I dropped my brush, ink splashing all over the table.

_What?_


	5. Steel

_What?_

No?

_No?_

What the flipping-

_No?!_

My mind went racing, trying to find reasons for why he had simply decided to just-

What?

Was I not smart enough? Had I not learned fast enough?

I stared at the crude characters on the scroll, now smudged and covered with massive blots of ink. I was learning  _writing_  already, and I had learned to walk much earlier than Shigure, and I had tried so hard to learn the language, and I was-

I was so far ahead. How could it not be enough?

The characters began to swim in front of my eyes, blurring and melting together into an amalgamation of headache-inducing horror. The brush had rolled off the table and was now spreading its ink all over the floor as well.

I barely noticed.

The weight of a bird of prey pressed heavily on my arm, now a mere memory etched deeper into my conscience than the rest, mixing with the memory of smoke and the sound of a broken bone and the image of red eyes glowing in the ark, and so many other things that now seemed prevalent, so much more meaningful.

I'd been here for four years – and I had grown so attached.

"Ah. Is it Shigure?"

Hashirama hardly seemed fazed. Rather curious, as if me not being given the position was hardly surprising.

"We'd  _appreciate_  it if you didn't meddle in clan-intern matters. The succession of leadership is not your business," I heard Izuna scoff, sounding – and feeling – like a cat hissing angrily at its greatest enemy, the neighboring cat.

I got up and walked out of my room, following the voices through the hall, silently gliding past the kitchen. I had no delusions, didn't think I could fool trained shinobi, but still. It seemed wrong not to sneak.

"Izuna, calm down," Father spoke with a subdued sense of warning. I shuddered, didn't like the tone he utilized, being vaguely reminisced of the tone used when he scolded me for being careless.

"Fish are going to spit fire before I'll allow a daughter of mine to take the position."

I froze from the steel in his voice, feeling my heart sink into my stomach and from there on ever lower. I didn't even know if it was hurt or disappointment, or both at once.

That was the reason?

_Because I was a girl?_

It made sense. Horrible sense. There were no female leaders in this time. All key positions were filled by men exclusively, at least from what little knowledge I could scrape together of the Founding Era, and what I had seen in my four years here. For a short moment seething rage burned in my stomach, I balled my fists, ground my teeth, bit my lip-

It was pointless.

It just subsided and I tiredly crept into the living room where I was met with the sight of my extended family casually seated around a low table, gazes slowly homing in on me. My feet carried me past Hashirama and my mother and Izuna, until I found myself restlessly gripping Madara's sleeve. He seemed to misunderstand my emotional state for he simply patted my head and then carefully pushed me along, basically gesturing me to 'go and play'.

Goddamnit,  _no_.

I held on to his sleeve, staring at him with the most stubborn kind of defiance I could muster. He frowned.

"Are you done with your assignment?"

I was so close to petulantly yelling "No!" at his face, I don't even know what stopped me. "I dropped the brush," I instead responded, trying very hard to sound like a toddler and not a despondent teen.

His frown deepened marginally. "I see."

He gazed at my mother, who, without a word of protest, got up and presumably went to clean the mess I had made. He had said nothing, and yet she immediately assumed her 'duty'. As his wife. It occurred to me only now that Mom worked ceaselessly to support this household and its inhabitants, and though incredibly skilled at drawing things that somehow held  _chakra_  in them she was... a housewife.

Was that my fate? His idea of my future?

If it wasn't to be called betrayal, the feeling I now felt was at the very least a deep and bitter disappointment. I dropped my behind on the floor, crossing my arms in utter defiance. Someone then patted my head again, though this time it was a massively smaller hand with a lot less weight behind it. I looked up to see Shigure towering above my head, grinning from ear to ear.

My heart sank to my stomach once again. Or maybe to my feet, since it had passed my stomach ages ago.

In the fashion of an ironic family sitcom I found myself cuddled by the eight-year-old, trapped by his much steadier arms tightly wrapped around my torso. I could feel him breathe, sadly I myself actually  _couldn't_ breathe in his tight grip.

"Shigure is being trained," Madara said. "But as of now I have no official successor."

Hashirama seemed intrigued, from what I could tell anyway. "Is that normal?"

Madara shrugged. "Leadership in this clan is peculiar."

What the fuck?!

I felt the anger burning again, without even thinking I slammed my admittedly pitiful teeth into Shigure's arm. He yelped and jumped back, then stared at me with an incredible look of betrayal.

Shit, I'm sorry.

He wasn't to blame.

I was torn between reaching out and apologizing to my cousin or defending myself from the scolding I was about to receive from Izuna, but instead neither of the two happened because I just blurted out, " _I_ want to be heir!"

I am a magician. I can make a room full of noisy people stay silent.

Izuna forgot his scolding for a moment and chuckled as if ridiculing the notion alone. "My, how ambitious."

"I can do it!" I defiantly proclaimed.

Hell yeah I could.

… Could I?

Izuna's eyebrows went up, almost raising past his hairline. His tone changed in an instant, the raging storm of ash within his soul going deathly silent. "Name three senior members of the clan."

Shit.

My mouth fell open and snapped a shut a few times quite akin to a fish before I dejectedly gave up, succumbing to the fact that I had no flipping idea about anything in this clan. I knew the way to the garden. Amazing.

Wow. Just wow.

I hung my head. "Don't know any."

"Aa. Thought so."

Rescue from humiliation came from the strangest of places in the end.

"Izuna, she's  _four_ ," Madara grumbled like an old bear would probably sound just shortly after hibernation had fogged his brain for several months. He seemed more annoyed by his brother's antics than bothered by my lack of knowledge, which, by the way, wasn't  _my_  fault.

"Good job humbling a kid."

I would've felt triumphant if not for the fact that he had denied me the chance in the first place. This way it only felt bittersweet. Amidst all of this I dared to gaze at Hashirama for a few seconds, who, more than anyone else, seemed to be deep in thought. He had his head tilted and his usual bright smile replaced by a much more distant-looking frown. It felt kinda... weird. Like a glimpse at the real thing, beyond an ever friendly and blinding mask. It was easy to underestimate this man by a landslide, I remembered that much, and yet, facing him like this... for the first time I felt a little intimidated –  _reminded_  even, reminded that he could summon trees wider than I was tall without breaking a sweat, and far,  _far_  worse.

"Hashirama-san?"

He snapped out of his thoughts almost immediately, offering me what seemed like a genuine and absolutely  _dazzling_  smile.

"Yes?"

"Do you think girls can't be leaders?"

His smile disappeared. I felt my heart drop. Not him, too...

"Well, Kasai..."

Seriously?

"Clan leadership is quite the burden, and..." He seemed to pause, searching for words - or excuses, there really was no difference. Eventually his frown returned, deeper than before. "Some people are vultures," he then added quietly, as if I hadn't really been supposed to hear.

No shit, someone had tried to kill me as a baby.

"With all due respect," I heard mother say, her voice echoing from the hallway seconds before she glided through the door. I was amazed by her lack of ink stains anywhere. "Our little princess might still have to learn some proper technique," she joked, waving the dropped brush in front of my face with a smirk, "but women can endure the burdens of leadership just as well."

The Senju reached for his cup of tea with a soft smile on his lips. "Well, she certainly has the bite."

Wow. Awful pun.

I looked at Shigure who still seemed a little insulted and only intensified his pout at the horrible choice of a joke. Admittedly I probably would be pouting too if my younger cousin had just bitten me for no apparent reason, out of nowhere, and with all the intensity of a frog leaping on only a single leg. The searing sting of guilt in my heart made me reach out to the boy, give him a short but decisive hug and a weakly muttered "sorry" before I decided to leave this conversation once and for all, snatched the brush from my mother and stormed out of the room before anyone could retroactively scold me for what I had done.

Stupid misogyny.

* * *

It was a week later that I saw myself ordered to my father's study, the place where I had found myself faced with a battle-ready Katana years ago. It was as clean as ever since he kept his workspace ridiculously tidy, but I was surprised to find Izuna there along with him.

… Evidently in a sour mood.

"You're joking."

Madara scoffed.

"Hardly."

I carefully stalked through the entrance, unsure whether I should truly enter. They seemed to be in the middle of an argument, but if I didn't enter he could possibly get angry at my hesitance and I didn't enjoy the prospect of that notion much. With my fingertips still holding on to the paper-thin door I came to a halt, not quite inside, not quite outside the room, waiting for some kind of gesture. Izuna swiveled around to stare at me, but did no further. Father was seated, and evidence suggested that shortly before Izuna had been, too.

"Come in," Father finally ordered, so I quickly shuffled past my uncle and came to sit on a third pillow I located on the ground.

"I didn't tell you to sit," he scolded. His face, I noticed, was almost impossible to read.

Crap. First mistake.

"I'm sorry."

"Aa. Such mistakes better become scarce in the future, or you will find your life difficult."

Was that... a threat?

No. If he wanted to be threatening he used different wording, a different tone, a different body language. I had seen him threaten people.

It was... a warning. A benevolent warning in a sense, and somehow that was rather more terrifying than a threat. If he deemed it necessary to warn me there was a bumpy road ahead.

"You turned four barely a month ago," he stated, a simple and easy fact. That was true, aside from the small detail that I had no sense of time, so I didn't know that it had only been a month.

"So far your training didn't extend beyond basic stamina and education."

Oh right. Running laps around the pond. So not fun.

"You have stated your desire to take leadership of the Uchiha after me," he continued as a light frown slowly began to form on his face, "and while I cannot allow that," he then paused solely to give me an intense stare that nearly had me withering away, "it would be foolish not to train you."

"In the case of emergency," Izuna added, with a tone that suggested he himself didn't actually believe it. I didn't really know what his deal was. Did he want to see his own son in power? Shigure didn't seem to have any such desires.

"You will thus join Shigure's training sessions."

I could see Izuna's glare turn into a burning inferno.

"Madara, I'm-"

"I  _know_  what your complaint is and  _you_ already know the only response I am willing to give you."

The younger brother visibly clenched his jaw.

"Fine."

Crap.

 


	6. Mistakes Were Made

_How bad could it possibly be?_

Those were the words I repeated to myself over and over again, a symphony of words turning into a mantra slowly but steadily by the time I had arrived outside to train with my uncle the very first day. I had tried to sleep and eat well solely to brace myself for this moment, but sleep hadn't come easily and to top it off the food was now heavy in my stomach.

Shigure was already up and running, literally, because he was jogging around the garden at a gentle pace. Did I ever mention that Izuna's and our house shared a garden? They were connected. It seemed a little unusual to be honest, but if memory served me well Uchiha lived in their own district anyway, so this was probably only marginally weirder.

My stamina wasn't amazing, but I thought it couldn't hurt to join my cousin. Izuna was nowhere to be seen as of now, but I could sense his presence at the other end of the pond, meaning he was likely still at home taking care of who knows what.

We ran a few laps together, then eventually sat down underneath a tree. Shigure handed me a flask filled to the brim with cold water.

"Izuna is still inside?"

He shrugged. "Visitors." Though I couldn't sense anyone else besides Izuna I could  _certainly_  feel my cousin's gaze resting on me while I took a few gulps of cold water. "Your stamina is crap, by the way."

Wow.

"I know," I responded dryly. Wonderful thing to be told in the morning. I was slipping into my teenager-self, which was a problem on its own. I had to try to sound like a toddler more. Last thing I needed was people getting suspicious. I wanted to impress, but I had to be careful.

He frowned, still looking vaguely unhappy. "You bitme."

"I was angry."

Angry at the adults, yes, but still angry.

"You  _bit_  me!"

"You tried to drown me."

He threw his hands up as if being faced with a personal attack. " _You_  wanted to see the fish up close."

"Not  _that_  close!"

I jumped like a cat when Izuna's presence came down next to me in almost an instant, even though he had been at least a hundred meters away not even a second before. Damn shinobi and their damn high speeds. Izuna seemed to be even faster than average.

"This argument is over," he ordered sharply. I knew immediately that defiance was in all likelihood the worst thing I could've come up with here, so I merely shut up, gave Shigure the flask and got up on my legs.

"Shigure, return to what we worked on yesterday. I want to see your progress in two hours."

The kid bowed and uttered a quick "understood," then trotted off into an out-of-the-way corner of the garden.

And now... now I was alone with Izuna.

"As for you – Shigure is right, if blunt. Your stamina is crap. I can't work with you like this." How could he even have heard that? His arm reached into a bag he carried by his side and reemerged with a structure not unlike an hourglass – in fact, it probably  _was_  an hourglass. The sand inside was a pale grey instead of the yellowish brown I was used to seeing. Maybe it was... ash?

"You will start running laps," he instructed, "until the sand in the glass has completely reached the bottom."

He turned the glass, and the sand or ash or whatever inside began to trickle. "If you stop running to 'catch a break' or whatever your short-sighted reasoning may be," he took the structure in his hands and loosened a mechanism in the middle, leaving the entire sand to drop to the bottom almost at once, "I will reset the timer."

Shit.

So I had to keep running without breaks or he'd keep resetting the timer until... until I collapsed. And it would only get harder with each time I failed.

He turned the hourglass once again, and the sand began to trickle. Izuna clapped his hands as if awaiting an exciting spectacle, accompanied by a fitting smirk. "Well, what are you waiting for, princess? Run!"

I ran.

How bad could it possibly be? Turns out, really fucking bad.

The first attempt the hourglass had merely reached a quarter of its timer before I could no longer motivate myself to keep running and dropped to my knees. The hourglass was reset mercilessly and I found myself running on even less energy, and at that point it didn't even reach a fifth, and it only got worse from there, until after four turns I was shaking and on my knees and nearly throwing up and ready to  _cry_.

At that point Izuna finally got up and put the hourglass away, but it wasn't the end – though I sure wished it was. I was given ten minutes of resting before being forced to get up on my legs again. Izuna had 'jokingly' called it the warm-up phase.

Funny. Really funny. I was certainly warm now, warm enough to burn like hellfire, in fact.

After that he turned to training my coordination, a skill so very vital for shinobi to survive – and surprisingly I didn't yet have an  _ounce_ of it. I got confused by my feet and hands and the exhaustion of running beforehand only increased my ever expanding brain fog. I couldn't think fast enough and got several black spots and bruises while trying to handle the exercises he gave me. I mentally cursed both him and myself,  _and_  Shigure while I was at it because occasionally catching a glimpse of him being so much steadier on his legs and vastly faster to boot was one of the most frustrating things I had experienced in recent memory.

By the end of the day I was crawling rather than walking to bed, only ate because my mother had brought food to my room, then slept like a rock until next morning and nearly missed getting up in time to still catch breakfast. I was so  _hungry,_ every bone and muscle in my body ached, my mind was spinning around itself like a Frisbee mid-flight. I wanted to cry.

The next day went like this. And the day after that, and I believed that the next day after that would as well, and probably all of eternity. I was ready to collapse come morning already - apparently that was enough exhaustion for Izuna to feel satisfied. I was taken inside his home rather than outside, a place I had rarely had the honor of entering, but frankly I was still too tired to care about where I was going much right now. It seemed strangely silent in there, the only thing audible an occasional soft purr.

Right. He worked with cats. How could I forget.

It only occurred to me now that I had never seen Shigure's mother. He had never mentioned her, neither had Izuna, and overall she just seemed strangely absent from life. Which probably meant that she literally was no longer alive.

As it turns out, the fourth day was theory time. The room he took me to was dusty and smelled old and of dry parchment, a scent that hit me like a wall as I strode through the door and almost had me sneezing twice in the first three minutes.

From behind a tower of rather chaotically stacked books emerged a black feline body, a pouch strapped around the belly, a blue piece of cloth tied around the neck and characteristically white socks marking the slender paws. The cat observed me with quiet intelligence, its eyes the color of brilliant emeralds. It settled down on another book, tail swishing around softly. I felt unnerved by the beast, my impending 'death' by cat still fresh in memory, and this one seemed smarter than an animal had any right to be.

"Izuna, this room is a travesty."

_Holyshitittalks._

A cat was talking to me.

A cat.

Izuna, being his nonchalant self, seemed hardly fazed. "Take the complaint to Goro, he is usually in here with Shigure."

The cat made a noise of displeasure. Its... her?... Her gaze came to rest on my face, seemingly taking in every little detail and committing it to memory within mere seconds. "This is her?" The animal smoothly got up on its four legs and stalked closer, tentatively testing the waters. "Does she listen?"

Izuna tilted his head, as if having to think about this very hard. "Occasionally."

Woah. Woah, dude. I was super obedient. I always did as asked!

"Kasai, this is Miki. She will help you read."

_What?_

The following weeks I learned a few things. One, never underestimate a cat's ability to lecture you on history. Miki's knowledge was so vast that any random Wikipedia page would probably curl up and cry in the corner. Two, if a cat tells you to learn by heart the names of the last twenty Daimyou of any given country, you do that. You do it, our you go home with a massive scratch and the scolding of your lifetime. Three, do not ever doubt that a cat can do something that would seem like a human activity only. If you do, see consequences of two and apply.

My schedule from then on was two days training, one day education. It was, for the most part, world history. Very little about the clan or other shinobi itself, which I figured was because they kept that knowledge under wraps. It was power not given up easily, and sure as hell not stored in someone's personal library.

After three weeks I managed for the first time to run a full turn of the hourglass. It was a hellish exercise and I collapsed on my knees after the last grains of sand had trickled to the bottom, but I had  _done it_  and for once Izuna seemed pleased, giving me a short but strangely genuine, "well done," and a mild pat on the back.

Of course, that didn't make him slow down in the least. He mercilessly continued with coordination after that.

Things went on this way, week for week, until eventually running a single turn of the hourglass became a start rather than the first hurdle, and soon I could run a second without massively exhausting myself, and then a third. Izuna kept increasing the difficulty of the coordination exercises, ensuring that I still always went home with new bruises, but the pain became easier to bear and – eventually – barely noticeable. The only reason I got hurt at all was the fact that he liked to burn the term 'dodge' into your mind so deep you could eventually do it in your sleep, so basically he had trained my reflexes, too, and I hadn't even noticed at first. I wasn't as fast as Shigure and still couldn't run as long, but hey, he was twice my physical age.

One evening after exercise he sat down next to me, once again brotherly sharing his water flask, though by now I had my own. It was predictably empty since I drank a lot during exercise. The irony of this was entertaining in some way – in my old life I had always lamented my lack of family, exercise, motivation and structure. Here I was, being showered with all of those things, and it was the most exhausting collection of circumstances I had ever encountered.

"You're getting better."

It sounded like stating a fact, not a compliment, so I simply nodded.

"It gets easier," he continued, leisurely gazing at me. "When my training started things were pretty much the same."

I paused in my attempt to swallow a bit more water than my mouth could naturally hold and as a result choked and coughed, spreading half of the water over my black pants. Shigure patted my back, but I was mentally elsewhere already. It had never occurred to me that Izuna had trained his son the same, no. For some reason – or rather obvious reasons – I had assumed that he was going uncharacteristically hard on me, in part because he still didn't like me as much, in part because he begrudged me the fact that he was forced to take care of my training.

And yet here we were. Izuna was just a crazy teacher all around.

* * *

I came home past dawn one evening, after a particularly long-winded exercise that had left me brain-fogged more than physically exhausted. It was silent inside, but from the main room the subdued hum of faint voices carried through. My parents were talking quietly, it seemed. Hunger drove me to the kitchen instead though, where leftover food was still waiting for me.

We didn't always eat dinner together. With the irregular schedule of shinobi it was nearly impossible, but this way with the kitchen adjacent to the main room I could at least hear my parents talking. Their presences were soft and subdued, barely noticeable. Calm.

"You are underestimating me," my mother said, voice carrying a hint of mild amusement.

"I don't think so."

What were they doing?

I shoved a load of rice into my mouth and waddled through the door into the neighboring room. The scene I was faced with was basically my parents sitting opposite of each other at the low table with a large board between them, little stones scattered all over it not unlike something you'd see on a chessboard, except way more confusing to my untrained eye. I frowned, trying to remember the name.

Shogi. Right.

They were basically playing chess.

To be frank, I was too stupid for this game. I didn't understand a single thing about chess, much less Shogi. Sure I had always set myself the goal to learn it, but like so many things I hadn't actually done it in the end, and now I was in the process of living a second life and I still didn't know it. I decided to sit down at the table next to them, bowl of rice in hand, and observe the game.

This was bizarre in more ways than one. The most I had ever seen them do with each other was talk, and now they were suddenly playing board games? Had I missed something? I mean, sure, I existed, but still, they did not seem especially invested in each other.

"How was your training?"

Father seemed mentally absent, but not absent enough to not ask this question, apparently. He casually navigated a piece across the board, leading Mom to make a noise of dissatisfaction. Were you supposed to show your emotions like this? Going by the raised eyebrow Madara displayed in return I guessed not.

"Shigure fell off a tree."

Mother hummed. "Yes, that happens to all young shinobi." She smirked softly and winked with a hint of mischief. "Even to your father, I bet."

"Focus on your damn turn."

"I'm not hearing disagreement."

I forced down a snort with a load of rice, narrowly avoiding a glare from Father. It didn't really seem too serious, but still, I'd prefer to not draw his ire.

"Fret not, I'm sure even Hashirama fell once or twice."

"Woman, just shut up."

He seemed exasperated more than genuinely angry, which was bizarre all on its own given his almost disastrous temper at times. I finished my bowl of rice, observed their game for a little longer and then succumbed to my exhaustion by going to bed before they finished.

I did wonder who won in the end.


	7. Demons

I spent my days learning world history and training, eventually starting on simple taijutsu exercises, target practice and hand signs. The frequent lessons with Miki accelerated my progress on reading and writing, gave me a better understanding of the world outside Konoha and gave me a strange sense of home in this war-torn world. Its history was as rich and vivid as that of my last life, and every event I learned of drove home the point that it was more than just a story.

It was easy to slip into a routine after a while; days seemed to blend together, even with training. It stopped being special, more a fact of life. Six months in I had my first spar with Shigure, and though I made a valiant effort I lost to his skill and speed. I'd be lying if saying it didn't bother me especially because Father had been watching through the open door of his study, but Shigure _was_  a lot older than me, and that would obviously never change. Maybe I'd catch up some day once we both reached adulthood.

Sometimes I played with Kawarama, my cousin on the Senju side. Sadly he was about half a year younger than me and behaved more like someone our age, which meant that he was very huggable, but not a good conversation partner overall. Shigure was better at this, but we spent so much time together that he was more of a brother than a friend. In other words, we occasionally ended up trading blows, and the bastard _always_  won.

It was strange to say, but I was... kind of lonely. I wanted a friend. I never interacted with any of the other clan children that absolutely had to exist if the clan didn't want to go extinct in the next few decades, my parents conveniently kept me away from them, and this even though I had heard people asking about me. I felt like a basement dweller with how little I got out. Even Kawarama only ever got to visit, I had never seen his house myself. I knew that Madara was likely incredibly paranoid about letting me go outside with the attempt on my life and all, but wasn't this a little over the top?

By the time I was five I had devised a cunning plan to escape the maddening confinement of our residence. We had days without training, obviously – Izuna couldn't sacrifice all his time teaching two kids how not to die. Normally I spent those with writing practice, drawing with Mom or, if he was around, holding scrolls for Madara in his room while he complained to himself about finances, but one day I decided to be a little rebellious and use this time of least supervision on schedule to sneak out. It wasn't exactly _hard,_  per se. The front door wasn't locked during the day, the defensive seals my mother had put up didn't register me as a threat and the door to my room was conveniently close to the exit, leaving very little travel time to get caught. The most difficult part was really choosing a moment of parental absence – I wasn't able to walk so quietly that they couldn't hear me and the door would obviously make a noise if opened. An opportunity presented itself however when Izuna entered without closing the front door and I used the momentary noise to slip through.

I didn't really have a plan where I was going yet, but I sensed something would come up in due time. I mean, this was a district populated by a sole ninja clan, and it was huge. Something exciting had to be out here.

When I left the front door I was still feeling relatively positive about what I had just done, but the moment I set foot on the street I suddenly realized that I was, well... alone and _in the middle of the_   _street_. Filled with ninjas. Foreign people kept walking past me in both directions, most of them familiar only in presence and appearance, and all wearing the red-and-white crest on their backs that I had grown so used to seeing everywhere now. People of all sizes and ages, some seeming barely older than me, all apparently being busy.

I had never left the house on my own, and now, out here, I suddenly started to feel a little anxious. I ran to the other side of the street and leaned against a lamp post for a few seconds, trying to regain my composure. The overwhelming noise of chakra and visual overload were causing my heart to nearly jump out of my chest. And here I thought I had gotten over my social anxiety. Apparently two years of therapy still weren't worth shit.

Okay, Kasai. Calm. It's not that bad. No one's going to kill you.

Yeah, easy to say. Not like anyone tried to kill me as a baby already. Oh _wait._

But well, they're dead, are they not? That broken neck sure sounded convincing.

I shuddered at the memory, then shook my head and decided to move on before my mind summoned even more buried pictures I'd rather _keep_  buried. The streets weren't easy to navigate from the looks of it and the whirl of chakra signatures and noise were starting to give me a headache already. Sometimes I wished I could just turn it off, but I yet had to find a way to make the constant chaos of chakra stop. I had tried meditation, shutting down my mind – it only made things worse. It really was like constant background noise, it became louder the more quiet everything else was.

Within said cloud of noise I tried to latch on to a single one, hoping to fade out the rest, but Uchiha signatures were laughably similar – I could only keep them apart after spending a lot of time with someone. Eventually I managed to home in on a familiar one – it was Shigure. He stood out because his presence felt a bit like a gentle drizzle of rain to me, followed by a soft gusts of wind – only that the rain was made of ash. I held on to his signature and tried to find him in the street, navigating around a few clansmen in the way – I almost ran into a boy about Shigure's age once, but he merely scoffed and moved on.

The Uchiha district was huge. I had never seen much of it, and I was generally wary of climbing up walls and the like yet, so all I could do was run into the general direction of his presence and hope that I would find him eventually. As I walked on the houses to each side of the road grew more and more sparse until said roads turned into gravel paths and vegetation took over, eventually I found myself surrounded by small trees and bushes around a beaten path that barely qualified as anything usable at all, and his presence burned like a bonfire in the immediate environment, leading me to follow his direction more precisely. I caught up with him at the edge of a large clearing eventually, running up to him with the familiar feeling of a minor thrill jetting down my spine. I wasn't supposed to be here, but it was kind of exciting to be after I had been locked up for so long, and this was a whole new world to see.

Shigure took up a startled expression upon spotting me running towards him at full speed. He looked behind him, seeming scared of something in the general direction, then returned his gaze to me as I came to a halt in front of him. I could sense a few people behind him, but not how many.

"Why are you here? Did your father send you?"

His entire body language spoke of anxiety, as did his voice. Was he doing something forbidden, or was it because I wasn't supposed to be here?

"No," I whispered in return, as if keeping a huge secret. "I followed you."

His eyes grew wide as plums and fell on my face, as if he couldn't fathom what I had done. He had no time to reply however, because someone's voice echoed across the clearing.

"Shigure!"

The boy grew even more tense, gaze switching targets in a hectic back and forth.

"You coming?"

Not far behind him I now spotted two kids waving their arms in a relatively wild fashion, then within a few seconds they were in front of us, not the least out of breath. They were about Shigure's height, so I assumed they were close to his age. Beyond their bodies blocking my view I could now sense an entire collection of people, all coming closer, perhaps wanting to figure out what the deal was. Likely more children.

"Who's this?", one of them asked while the other unceremoniously poked at me. "You got a brother?"

Hey, I'm a girl!

I puffed my cheeks, just barely holding back my rebuttal by sheer will. No, actually, I was scared shitless. This was not how I had imagined meeting new people, being mistaken for a boy while some rude kid poked my face.

Shigure shook his head. "Cousin. I, uh... could you tell Elder Iwao that I'll be late? I need to bring her back home before-"

"That won't be necessary."

The entire clearing grew abruptly quiet. Seriously, it seemed like even the birds decided to pack their shit and leave. Nest elsewhere. Start a better life.

Shigure turned his head and bowed to the person that somehow at some point had just shown up as shinobi were wont to do. "Iwao-sama," he acknowledged, seeming unnervingly quiet and distant all of a sudden. I had never seen this kind of shift in him.

The man seemed reasonably old, maybe in his fifties, with graying short hair that must have been a dark brown in color once and almond-shaped eyes that seemed just as sharp as the eyes of a young man. Deep wrinkles were spread all over his face, giving him his aged look. Regardless he was standing with his back straight, even though he was carrying a cane he was casually resting his hands on.

"I see Madara's daughter is joining us today."

Some of the kids that had gathered behind him exchanged curious glances, whispers, even some confused stares. I increasingly began to feel like I really, _really_  shouldn't be here and coming here had been a huge mistake. Just to make it worse, they were _all_  boys.

"Excuse me, uh, Elder Iwao-", I faltered for a second, "...-sama, but I believe, I'm- I'm not supposed to be joining you. In fact, I think I should be returning home... now..."

Before I even knew it I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head, found myself propelled forward by the force behind the hit and landed on my hands and knees, letting out a cry of both surprise and pain. I groaned and looked up behind me, realizing only slowly through the throbbing pain that the old man had struck me with his cane.

I just-

What-

_Why?_

The kids around me slowly began to whisper, low and suppressed chuckles and other noises of subdued amusement echoing in my ears long after they had passed. They were laughing at me.

_No. Nonononono-_

They were _laughing_  at me!

I felt anger bubble in my chest, restricting any coherent thought I could have had, then it changed to despair and finally helplessness.

Get up. _Get up._

I forced myself to my feet even though my head hurt and tears began to sting my eyes. God no, I couldn't cry here, not in front of everyone-

I felt a steady hand grab my shoulder and twist my entire body around until Shigure's face came into view. He seemed so serious I barely recognized him, as if he had just switched shinobi mode on. When he parted his lips to speak the words that came out were so quiet they might as well have been the wind.

"Kasai, that was an order. Learn to read between the lines or you'll be in trouble."

That _wasn't_  trouble already?!

Without further elaborating he let go and gestured me to move closer to the center of the clearing, following the other children of which some were still quietly giggling or talking, no doubt about me and my absolutely epochal failure.

_How_  was I supposed to tell that was an order, exactly? I only meant to-

"Kasai, go already," Shigure ordered, brows furrowed. "You're only making it worse."

I stared at him for a few seconds, not sure if he was being serious or not. "If my father hears of this-"

"He will scold you for coming here."

I felt my heart sink. Technically he was right, I wasn't supposed to be here. Yet I also couldn't imagine that Madara would just let someone hitting me stand without another word. Not even the so called elders.

Right?

I... I wasn't so sure.

Eventually I gave up and followed the other kids to the center, now dreading what would happen next. I saw that by now another adult had arrived, who, to be quite frank, looked even worse than the other. His skin was a rare olive color, his eyes ever so slightly slanted and giving his face a predatory appearance, along with the strangely straight nose that was almost feline somehow. He seemed younger too, in his thirties at best, and his hair was shaved to the point he only retained a mohawk-like central strip with a small ponytail at the back. Both his cheeks were tattooed, adorned by black swirls right under his eye in fact, though one side was larger than the other.

"Nagisa," Iwao called. The newcomer inclined his head ever so slightly, displaying his respect and inferior position in the infernal Uchiha pecking order.

"Shigure," I asked meekly. "What is happening here?"

The boy didn't think long to respond. "Training. I come here whenever Dad doesn't have time for me," he casually began to explain. "It's pretty nice to spar with others sometimes, see where you're at."

From the corner of my eye I saw this Nagisa fellow clap twice, then yell: "Ankle-biters, warm up!"

The kids began to move – some ran, some moved through a bunch of kata, one of them even tossed a fireball the size of a small boat across the clearing and reduced a few trees at the edge to charcoal.

Holy shit.

Shigure simply grabbed my arm and started running laps around the clearing. I was somewhat grateful for his quick thinking, since I was currently pretty much out of my mind, a littleoverwhelmed by all the chakra suddenly in motion. Most of them weren't exactly powerful signatures, after all they were kids, but still. So many different signatures, it was confusing my brain. At the very least Izuna's harsh training allowed me to not collapse after three rounds, I could keep up reasonably well.

"Why did you come here? This was foolish."

Shigure didn't seem amused. To be honest, looking at this now, it was a fucking stupid idea, and my head was still throbbing as proof.

"I don't know," I responded, and that was the end of it.

After we were done with warm-up the kids gathered at the center again, where Nagisa began to seemingly arbitrarily pair them off. My heart sank to my knees when I realized that he was picking opponents, and by the size of the clearing I figured that the spars would take place with an audience. I frantically sought Shigure, him being the only person I had ever really sparred with, but he was already being paired off with a kid roughly his age and brown hair. It was the guy I had run into earlier in the street.

Shit. No. Crap.

Just- Just crap.

The stranger stared at me with mocking smirk on his lips. "Taken, sorry," he jeered, as if well aware of my steadily rising inner sense of dread and desire to stick with the only person I knew here, or simply trying to unnerve me terribly. I took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in my throat.

_Don't_  cry here.

"Kid."

Startled by the voice behind I whirled around, finding only Nagisa there, and a little kid looking only a little older than me. "This one."

Okay. _Okay._  This might not be so bad.

"Actually, Nagisa, I would like to see her face Tora."

Iwao's voice sounded like a demon from hell right now.

Why, old man. _Why_.

I wanted to cry.

Nagisa tilted his head and thoughtfully furrowed his brow. "Michi is no match for Shigure, though."

My gaze drifted towards Shigure's partner, who observed me with barely concealed amusement. I couldn't match Shigure either. How was I supposed to match this guy, then?

The older man nodded, putting his weight on his cane. "I am aware, but she is Madara's daughter."

My father wasn't even training me!

Why had I come here, just why, _why-_

Tora switched positions with Michi. I didn't know either of them, but this Tora didn't seem to be interested in exchanging any friendly words, in fact, he seemed to desire the exact damn opposite, and that was to humiliate me completely here and now.

Iwao summoned a long and seemingly worn bamboo cane from a sealing scroll, twisted it in his hands a few times and apparently deemed it proper for use, then he handed the cane to Nagisa who trotted to the center of the clearing and unceremoniously slammed the thing about thirty centimeters into the ground.

I somehow had it in me to flinch.

"For all of those who are new here today," Iwao began to explain with his voice raised, "this bamboo cane will be your only weapon. The one who manages to claim it first will have the advantage in the following spar."

I felt about ten eyes on me, as if I was the only one new here today. Even Iwao stared at me as if giving me a personal instruction. I felt even smaller than I already was, surrounded by creatures, monsters, appearing so much taller than me.

I wanted to run. Get away.

What were my chances?

My gaze skipped from point to point, behind me, beside me, in front of me- there really was no way I could get away quickly enough to not get caught.

None.

Absolutely _none._

I prayed for my father to somehow miraculously appear.

"Tora and Kasai, you'll be first."

The boy leaned in as if to give me one last push and whispered, "Good luck."

I knew then and there that I was dead.

* * *

We were facing each other, the bamboo stick between us. My heart was in my throat, my stomach ready to empty its contents on the ground.

I would fail. I _knew_  I would fail.

They had _set me up_  to fail. I didn't even know why. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe Iwao thought I was obnoxious.

Why was I here. It was stupid. Stupid _stupid._

Nagisa raised his hand to give a signal, and then everything was over.

We both moved at almost the exact same time, but Tora was faster than me, having the advantage of longer legs and more time to train. He reached the cane a second before me, swung it over his head and aimed at my legs in one fluid motion.

_Dodge_!

I slammed my feet into the ground and came to a halt just a few centimeters before the end of the cane, but the force had me sauntering forward and into my opponent with my entire weight. I somehow had the mind to reach out with my hand and aim it at his chest.

He jumped back, putting too much distance between us for comfort.

Shit.

I was still going forward with way too much energy behind it now.

Don't fall don't fall-

I somehow managed to turn it into a roll, but Tora was now coming at me with his damn bamboo stick, aiming for my exposed side. I dodged barely but didn't pay attention to his legs and found myself knocked on the ground. Kicking out blind in sheer confusion somehow allowed me to land a hit on his arm-

_Holy shit_  he dropped the cane-

I didn't waste time to listen to him curse, instead rolled around to grab the piece of bamboo now free for the taking, picked it up with one hand and basically sprang to my legs with the other.

Hit him!

His arm was exposed, I only had to aim-

I aimed, I realized the cane would connect with his arm, realized that it would cause him terrible _pain_ , it was a fucking _stick_  those things were hard oh god-

And then I almost faltered mid-strike, weapon connecting with his arm so weakly it would barely leave any damage even if it weren't just a piece of particularly hard wood.

No-

Nonono-

He scoffed and grabbed the cane with his other arm, yanking it out of my grip while I was staring at him wide-eyed and confused.

_No!_

"What kind of _princess_  are you?!" he asked, no, _yelled,_  something between anger and disbelief and-

Sharp pain erupted in my side, its source becoming clear only seconds before I felt another in my arm, and then my leg, I couldn't even, _couldn't_  react-

Shit, shit _shit._

_It hurt it hurt._

I went down, clutching my side and then my leg and everywhere else where he hit mercilessly.

Mercy, why had I shown him _mercy_?

He hit my stomach too, my entire body bent and writhed in pain.

Please stop, please just-

I reached out blindly hoping to stop the next blow, it instead connected with my fingers and left a sharp, searing, _searing_  pain there too, until everything hurt, _everything, it hurt so bad._

"P-please-" I could barely force out the words, all air gone from my lungs, "s-stop, please!"

I waited, silently, anxiously, yes, waited in terror.

But nothing else came.

The kid threw the cane away in a dismissive gesture, then turned around and didn't even bother to address me with another word. I tried to get up but the pain was so bad I couldn't even move my arms, everything felt so stiff, pain, pain everywhere.

"Shigure," I cried out, almost choked on the damn word, and noticed only now the tears streaming down my face, leaving hot streaks on my skin.

No, _no._

_They were laughing._

All of them, laughing, it was everywhere, I heard nothing else, nothing but laughter, laughter laughter.

Stop. Please _stop_!

Someone picked me up by the arms, but my vision was too blurry, I couldn't see who it was, I didn't even care, I wanted to be gone from here, just get away and never return.

* * *

It was Shigure who carried me home. I couldn't walk. I didn't _want_  to walk. I felt like a useless bag of shit and sand compiled into a collection of even more uselessness.

I had faltered mid-strike because I hadn't wanted to _hurt_  him. Shit, what kind of shinobi was I going to be?!

Was I going to be like this the next time, too? It's not like I hadn't sparred before, but I had never held a weapon, and the bamboo cane, no matter how crude, was just that.

I buried my face in Shigure's neck, feeling the tears stinging again.

It felt so stupid to cry, but everything hurt, and now they were all mocking me, probably telling all their parents what a weak little girl Uchiha Kasai was. Can't hit her opponent, how pathetic.

It could've-

Could've gone so well. I had the cane. I had the damn-

"Crying isn't going to solve this, you know."

Shigure seemed to have mentally disconnected from the situation at some point. He still seemed awfully calm, and so _distant._  I wanted the normal Shigure back. The one who hugged me and pouted when I bit him. It made me _angry._

"You didn't do anything!"

He shook his head. I felt the motion in my entire body, cringed from the pain.

"No one did anything..." I muttered weakly. "Why did they do this..."

"We're shinobi. What did you expect?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reached the end of pre-written chapters here.


End file.
